Monthly Archives: September 2015

On a Friday night in downtown Palo Alto — just a stone’s throw from Stanford University, office buildings and the technology hub of San Jose — the college bars and vegan restaurants lining its streets teemed with single men. But at Nola, a Creole-themed bar with notoriously bad service, Erika, 25, wasn’t having much luck meeting single guys.

“I ordered my drink, and my girlfriend and I threw out glances and smiles to many men we were interested in. However, none of the maybe 30 men surrounding us were eager to start a conversation,” Erika, who lives in nearby San Jose, told Mic. “I would come up to them directly, only to languish in their lack of conversation skills.”

In most urban areas like New York City, Philadelphia and Washington D.C., where single women handily outnumber men, such a scene would be wholly unfamiliar. But it’s par for the course in the sunny suburban sprawl of San Jose and the surrounding Bay Area cities, home to technology giants like Facebook, Google and Cisco, where college-educated single men outnumber women.

When Alexis Frulling was secretly recorded having a threesome in a deserted alley and the clip went viral on Reddit, she could have hid in the shadows, hoping no one would recognize her in the video. But instead, she uploaded a YouTube video calling out her haters.

“I can’t say I’m proud about it,” Frulling says in the video. “But I’m not ashamed.” Her story spread, with many praising Frulling for taking back control of her own sexual narrative.